Death, sex and the Cylon

Abstract

The second half of Battlestar Galactica ’s four-season narrative arc constitutes an extended, energetic and effective commentary on the philosophy of death initiated by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time . The Cylons demonstrate the crucial links between death, sexuality and reproduction. At first, the Cylons are infinitely downloadable and thus effectively immortal. D’Anna pursues a radical experiment in being-towards-death, deliberately and repeatedly ‘killing’ herself in a perpetual quest to understand the nature of being. For her, death has the status of a sexual fetish. Season four concerns the quest by certain individual Cylons to overcome Cylon immortality, the fulfilment of which permits some Cylons to attain what Heidegger calls an authentic being-towards-death. The end of Cylon immortality radically foregrounds the importance of sexuality and biology. The Cylons become obsessed with discourses of reproduction and racial purity, but their story ends with a radical endorsement of difference. The child Hera, a human–Cylon hybrid whose parents are played by multi-ethnic actors, becomes the ancestral mother of humanity. The show thus concludes by rejecting decisively both the old fears of racial miscegenation, and the newer fears of the techno-organic cyborg. BSG argues for a future of hybridity in which species merge, nations intersect and the biological and the cybernetic come together, leading us to a place where death establishes the possibility of meaning, and the love of bodies permits the fulfilment of that meaning.